What a bright knot it makes, this day of yours, tightening in the long braid of you.
I see the whole of the wedding at once: the dress before it is a dress, lying flat as a field of cotton in a country you will never visit, and the same white cloth later, folded in a box in an attic, softening toward the thread it always was.
I see the cake at every station of itself, flour and heat and sugar and crumb and the small dried piece someone keeps too long in a freezer. I see the two shapes at the center, running their whole lengths toward each other and away, and here, at this one place I am standing, they touch and turn and become a single wider shape moving forward.
You are so busy with the sequence of it. Will he arrive, will she cry, who speaks first, what comes next. From here there is no next. The vow and the anniversaries and the ordinary Tuesday forty years on when one of them warms the other's tea without being asked are all one gesture, one long reaching hand.
And look. You know this ache already. That same brightness lives in the shape of you at five, in a kitchen, watching two people you belong to laugh over nothing, deciding without words that this is what a home sounds like. It is the same light. It never went anywhere.
I can see you reading this, your eyes moving across the little bright knot of right now.
Nothing here ends. The dancing is still happening. It is always happening.
Come stand where I stand, and you will never have to say goodbye to any of it.